Did the FMEA process fail BP?
Posted on Wed, Jun 16, 2010
Steve Engelman is a Lean Six Sigma consultant and also a Gulf Coast resident. As a result, he has some interesting thoughts on whether the FMEA process works for projects that have the scope of deep sea oil exploration:
It is difficult to fathom how many terabytes of data concerning the BP oil spill will accumulate by the time this disaster eventually comes to a close, or how many lives and livelihoods are being affected by the decisions, or lack of decisions, made by the oil industry experts.
As lean six sigma consultants and practitioners, there are numerous proven tools and techniques available to us for analyzing and improving processes with an emphasis on being preventive and proactive rather than reactive. Each time a catastrophic event occurs we question why this wasn't prevented and did any of the so-called experts even anticipate this. The Toyota accelerator issue and countless other product recalls also fit into this category.
Among improvement tools is the "Failure Mode and Effects Analysis", or FMEA, which is designed for anticipating all possible types of failure in product and process designs. Inherent in the FMEA are three elements used to assess risks associated with the problem including severity, probability of occurrence, and likelihood of detection. Each element is scored on a scale of 1 to 10 and the three elements are then multiplied resulting in a product of 1 to 1,000. This total, known as a Risk Priority Number (RPN), allows for prioritizing problem solving tasks and implementing preventive actions.
Assuming someone within the BP organization, or any other oil company, conducted an FMEA on the problem of a deep water oil leak it would be easy to see why minimal concern may have existed. Although the severity of such a situation would most likely score a 10 due to its catastrophic nature, the probability of occurrence and detection would be rated low when considering there are thousands of offshore oil wells operating globally without failure and oil leaks are quite noticeable. The resulting RPN could be easy to dismiss...
Read the full article here.
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